English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Presentation: the passion for transmission 0:00 Join me on Patreon to access all my exclusive content. Special episodes, live video classes, philosophy get-togethers, a simple way to support my work while giving you food for thought. I'll be waiting for you on Patreon, the link is in the description. Dominique Pagani, hello. Hello Charles. Thank you very much for accepting my proposal to do this interview. I must admit it's a great honor for me. Before we start, could you introduce yourself for those who don't know you, and tell us why we're here today?
0:35 I don't think I'll return the thanks, because it's a shared honor to be in direct contact, I would say, even if it's online, and by voice, that's what matters, language is wonderful. But introducing myself, well, I have a bit more trouble talking about myself, generally speaking, I'll say this so I don't have to repeat it, I don't think I'm a creative person, but my passion is transmitting the creations and advances of others.
1:08 That's it, whether in philosophy, literature, music, it depends. But why are we here? First, let me say, don't think for a moment that I'm buttering you up or flattering you, and I want to say it's thanks to you. It's because I was very touched to see that you took an interest in the thought of my late friend Michel Clouscard, weren't you? And that you helped make him known, that's no small feat with your audience.
1:43 And it's a great step forward, I thank you again on his behalf. Again, don't think I'm flattering you, I repeat, but I greatly appreciated in your videos, first of all, the clarity. Which, in our discipline, is no small asset. There you go, I sometimes envy your manner, first your diction, because sometimes I notice that my son, calling me long-distance, tells me, when you finish your sentences, we can't hear you anymore, you're mumbling into your beard, there you go.
2:21 You pay attention to all that, which shows respect for the interlocutor. Singular or collective, isn't that so? And that, I admire enormously. And besides, I want to say, the way... I don't know if... Sometimes I have the impression that we spontaneously share the same tendency, even if I do it perhaps less well than you, but it's that when I present a philosopher, whether it's Plato, Althusser, Spinoza, whoever...
2:56 For me, he's the best when I'm presenting him. I mean, I don't nitpick him, you see what I mean? Yes, of course. And I see that you do that very well. I have a big handicap. It's that I talk much more than I write. There you go. I committed a book, you may have heard of it, published by Éditions Delga, called "Femininity and Community in Hegel." There, it's a book, I hope no one hears me on my island.
3:29 It's a somewhat lazy Corsican book of 120 pages. No, I'm exaggerating a bit. And then, I taught for years, you did too, I believe. And in a way, so, I'm in orality. I've always been in transmission, first as a teacher, for about fifteen years, and then, as a textbook editor, when I moved into the private sector, as they say when you go over to private industry, at Hachette, but in a subsidiary that designs textbooks for Africa, perhaps for French-as-a-second-language countries, as they say.
4:00 So I've always been in transmission. And when I found myself retired, I mean, I had a moment of melancholy, when I told friends, I'm not from the internet generation, but I said, I'm going to die soon, I'll leave my son nothing but a little book that's not much at all, and then, no money, because I ruined myself, I'll tell you this quickly, I'm not here to tell my life story, but I committed social suicide and didn't hold back, let's say, after my mother's death, it's a Corsican story, so I won't dwell on it. And I managed, afterward, to lose all the money I had earned, I earned a very good living.
4:37 And so, I told myself, there, I had a moment of melancholy, I said, I'm leaving him nothing, and all I do is talk, that leaves no trace, you see. Scripta manent, verba volant, and that's when the young people told me, you can talk now, it'll leave a trace, it's called the internet. That's how I started, for almost ten years now, the few videos on YouTube, where I try, using philosophy as a pretext, well, pretext, not in a reductive sense, but I mean, it's still the center of my talks, and I come back to it every time, at the same time, to patch up some gaps in general culture, in music, in literature.
5:14 I notice there's a demand for that, really like little birds opening their beaks, and that it's a bit the whole horizon of culture that has somewhat disappeared, I try, there, to take advantage of it to patch up gaps here and there. So, very quickly, I mean, for the rest, I repeat, I don't think I'm a creative person, I envy those who are, but I have the passion for transmitting the creations that struck me. Very good, yes, I think that's really our essential common point, the passion for transmission, and among other things, but mainly, philosophical transmission.
Works, music, and the English translation of Clouscard 5:51 So, I'm going to sum up a bit for everyone who would like to go see what you do, or what you've done. So, philosophically, you said it, you wrote a book on Hegel, so Femininity and Community in Hegel, which was published in 2010 by Delga. Sorry, I'm interrupting you, the relationship of aesthetics to politics in the system. There, that's important to point out, because, I'll say it now, even though I planned to say it later, you're also, I don't know if the term suits you, a musicologist, in any case, you're interested in music, and I'll refer our listeners to a short documentary that's freely available on YouTube, called The False Note, where you give us an analysis of music that I had never heard anywhere else, where you analyze it simultaneously from the angle of culture, the angle of economics, and even the angle of metaphysics.
6:46 Half-tones, it's so much not in his ear, culturally, collectively, that he couldn't manage to sing them. So, he sang the C major scale out of tune, and that gave us the miracle of the blues. You see, when I said miracle, it was unexpected, it wasn't planned that time. And at the same time, well, I spent more than three, four years in sub-Saharan Africa anyway, it's at the same time, the African form of resistance. The genius of African Americans is to have done both at once. Here's C major, here's C minor, both at the same time.
7:16 And you see, all that is a jazz chord. Repetition is the frozen side of things, it's the side where we find what Freud calls inertia. In the physical sense of the term, the inertia that preceded living matter. In the repetition of the same, there's none of that call to difference that makes for life. You have also written several prefaces and afterwords, notably the preface to Michel Clouscard's book, Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, in its 2008 reissue by Delga.
7:52 You also have educational activities, meaning you run philosophy workshops that are available on your site dominiquepagani.fr. There's even a book drawn from your teachings, written by Alexis Manago. Do you want to talk about that? Here it is. I avoid detours, I'll say in passing, as it's still more accessible than my chatter. That's right, Pagani Without Detours, I really liked the title, at least the title is as clear as your teachings are. And there are two things I still need to mention.
8:23 You took part in a documentary about Michel Clouscard's thought called Everything Is Permitted, Nothing Is Possible, from one of his famous quotes. We'll talk about that later. And you also have activities with associations, notably, you're currently working on translating Michel Clouscard's works into English. I wanted to ask you, where do things stand? Listen, thank you very much, again, for the cause. La causa here, is Michel's work.
8:55 I've just committed a preface, a preface that should serve, at the request of those working to translate him into English. I'll tell you right away where things stand. I wrote a preface where I develop, from beginning to end, the theme of this author's solitude, making clear that it's not a solitude in the psychological sense, and even less a social one. He was always surrounded by friends, he was a bon vivant, I mean, right up to his last breath, if I may say so, he was surrounded by devoted friends, but an ontological solitude, if I may say so, because like that solitude Lamartine speaks of in a famous line, one single being is missing and everything is depopulated, what he was missing was recognition.
9:42 And recognition from whom? From the one we're waiting for, isn't that so? When you're in love, you know very well from whom you're waiting for recognition, he was waiting for recognition from his comrades, which only came very late, when The Capitalism of Seduction was translated for the first time by Éditions Sociales at Messidor, which is one of my favorites because it's dedicated to me, I'm joking, let's say, the work that's currently the most advanced in terms of translation is The Metamorphoses of Class Struggle.
10:14 We chose this short work, it's not one of his biggest books, but because he says very clearly in it that this book presupposes all the others and that it's more horizontal, more transversal, that it sums them up, so to speak, and that it thus presents itself as a brief, almost terse thesis, you see, almost elliptical at times, and for the demonstrations, it refers back to all these other works. So we don't have confirmation yet that it will be translated, but it's moving forward.
10:46 Every month, one more wall is breached. The main obstacles, I worked for years, I told you, I did HR in publishing, the big problem for publishers is that they don't know where they stand with an author who isn't very well known. That's a commercial concern I understand, that we understand, but it's above all that which needs to be won over. The more well-known he becomes, so to speak. And there, you may already know that Ulrich Bonville devoted a short work to Michel Clouscard's writings, which has been translated into English, through the same channel, and which is currently helping to convince more and more people and bring down the last obstacles.
11:21 That's where things stand. Perfect. Thank you very much for all these clarifications. So, if you're actively working to make Michel Clouscard known to the American public, the goal of our interview today is going to be to make him known to our French audience as well, who may not know him. And that's why I turned to you. As I told you off camera, you knew him firsthand, so you're very well placed to speak, not in his place, but at any rate, to speak with full knowledge of the facts.
An applied Marxism, in the continuity of Hegel 11:52 For those who don't know him, Dominique, who was Michel Clouscard? What was his thesis? What was his philosophical position? His philosophical proposal? In short, to use a phrase that's become a bit outdated, what is Michel Clouscard the name of? So I'll start by saying about the man, that's not the subject, we agree, that he never hid his Marxist commitment.
12:23 He was always a Marxist, but very discreetly, he was never a member of the French Communist Party, but he always voted for it. And I know, though he didn't talk about it much, that he quietly wrote a check every month to Secours Populaire. You see, he wasn't the type to shout that from the rooftops. If I mentioned he was a Marxist, it's to anticipate my answer to your current question. We're in the sixties, roughly, when I meet him, a year and a half before '68, before it breaks out, but '68, so to speak, roughly, to give a sense of the timeframe.
12:57 And what reigns at that moment? Structuralism. It was existentialism just a little before, you know the sequence, then structuralism, then, excuse me, I'm skipping ahead, then there are the New Philosophers, and after that, it's not even worth talking about. There. And, in Marxist terms, the structuralist was Althusser. Clouscard's intervention is exactly the opposite of Althusser's.
13:31 Althusser spent a large part of his work — I'm not judging who's right or wrong here — but it's something I'll point out, I'm sure you know it, decoupling Marx from Hegel, whereas Clouscard insists on placing himself within the continuity of Hegel and Marx, of course, that's not the same thing. But, from a philosophical point of view, we can't — I'll come back to this — what's specifically philosophical, we can't sidestep Hegel. There, so I'll start there.
14:01 And above all, the difference with Althusser is, rather than doing what Althusser does, which is asking what Marx meant to say, telling everyone else, look, you haven't understood anything about Marx, besides, nobody has understood anything, until I, Althusser — I'm caricaturing a bit, he's brilliant, mind you, it's more serious than that, he knows his stuff, that's normal, great. But Clouscard, he's not going to spend his time figuring out what Marx said, he assumes the corpus is known and he applies it to musical consumption.
14:38 Sorry, I'll start there, because the only field that pretty much justifies — when he tells Dominique Pagani that this book owes a lot to — it's in the domain of my veneer of bourgeois culture that let me slip him things like that, you see, about music. And in musical consumption, in mores, there I come back to The Capitalism of Seduction, his main initiative was that everything is done so we don't talk about class struggle. I'll answer there, going indirectly to the heart of his content, that it's concealed and that it constitutes, in relation to the Freudian or Lacanian unconscious, whichever you prefer.
15:20 He says it's the unconscious of that unconscious. Because it's concealed by what? Already by a dominant language. I don't want to make a list of it because it would be endless, I mean, but the number of notions that seem obvious — take, for instance, we talk about overproduction, in economics, I'm doing this on purpose to ease into it, moving gradually from the philosophical field to the economic field — overproduction, from what point do we decide that we're producing too much?
15:50 'Too much' isn't a word, it's not a judgment of existence, to use general logic's terms, it's a value judgment. Too much. If someone tells me, Pagani, you consume too much — I'm in 18 square meters with no shower, I'm not here to make people cry over my situation, I've never been so well off — inwardly, but that's due to the twists of my life. But no one's going to tell me I consume too much, I'd love to consume a bit more. I'm a citizen of the fifth richest country in the world, there, I mean.
16:22 So, from what point, there, the threshold, from there, there, we're producing too much. It's obvious that it's hard to admit we're producing too much relative to the margin I wanted to make, because I'll be forced to lower my prices. You see, to restore the true content of class struggle, which isn't found in the discourse of, I would say, sectarian Marxists. If there are any, I don't know. Those who often say, well, fine, you've won, okay, but come on, Nerval, music, dreams, poetry, if really everything is political as these people think, I tell them, why don't you talk about love or music?
17:05 If everything is political, you're going to end up in the political, but the real kind. That's what Clouscard does. He always starts from an applied Marxism, so I repeat myself, applied to clothes, to looks, to speech habits, you see, to expressions that are fashionable for a generation depending on whether it's after or before the Marshall Plan, and he then links it to historico-political determinations, so to speak. The first accomplices that Clouscard thought he detected on the ground were, as it happens, those who, like Goldmann, like Lefebvre, came out of a Marxist current that wasn't content to develop the productive forces and relations of production, but brought the essential, unavoidable, necessary analysis of these relations into phase with everyday lived experience, everydayness, the concrete, interiority, in short all these categories now summed up in the vague terms of affect, and which Clouscard concentrates in the term psyche.
18:08 To reconcile praxis and psyche, that is, the whole economic, historical becoming, that of material production, and the psyche, which seems the furthest removed from it while being its highest product, the most elevated — that's common sense, I don't say the goal because it's reached at the very heart of their masterworks, it's the moment shared by Rousseau and Clouscard in holding together both The Social Contract and Julie, or the New Heloise, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
18:41 Likewise, you find in Clouscard the critique of "libertarian liberalism" and that extraordinary title "Treatise on Mad Love." You said it, Clouscard is a Marxist who, unlike many Marxists, applies Marxism, and his application of Marxist tools leads him ultimately to a very original thesis, very bold, especially for his time, that is, from the early 1970s, which almost no other Marxist would arrive at besides him, which is to note a metamorphosis of class struggle, a mutation of capitalism into a form that, intuitively, is not the form we associate with capitalism, namely its liberal, libertarian form.
From liberal competitive capitalism to liberal-libertarian capitalism 19:30 And libertarian liberalism, we know it's a Clouscardian concept that is absolutely central to his work. So I would obviously have many things to say, but I'd rather invite you to speak, and I'd like to hand the floor over to you on this. What is libertarian liberalism in Michel Clouscard's work? Well, first, thank you for the summary, because it now allows me to move on to Clouscard, cruising speed. That was a bit of an introduction to the essentials, but no, the essentials still need unfolding. What is libertarian liberalism?
20:00 It's a mutation of capitalism, first of all. So we need a little bit of history, it won't take long. He distinguishes two, in order to distinguish a hundred, it's not... Good thinking means good divisions, depending on... But there's competitive liberal capitalism, CLC as he sometimes abbreviates it, the capitalism, I would say, of our grandfathers, whose essential values in terms of mores are thrift, effort, work, we're far from the libertarian.
20:33 Yes, we're closer to the Protestant ethic as it was theorized, the ethic of effort, the ethic of accumulation, work. Max Weber, who is not a Marxist, but who sees very clearly the link that indeed exists — the capitalist countries that succeeded best, in the capitalist mode of production, to speak in Marxian terms, are Protestant countries, whether on the west or east side of the Atlantic, that's no coincidence. Compare North America to Latin America, Catholic, there's no comparison.
21:06 And libertarian liberalism — you just need to take what I said about competitive liberal capitalism, the one of dad's generation, and multiply it by minus one, if we were doing math, it's no different, it's the opposite. Giscard is going to authorize the pill, and that's good, mind you, we're not against it, but let's say that's where I claim to be revolutionary. I cheat on my wife because I'm for free love, so I'm a true revolutionary communist. That's where Clouscard would say, 'do what you want, but don't go telling me that's the vanguard of the revolution.'
21:45 You see, to sum it up in his own words: "do what you want, but state it as such." State it as such. There. So, opening all the doors of desire, I continue my portrait of the libertarian liberal, and that's where Giscard comes in: if we had kept the ideology of the previous capitalism, we'd go back to overproduction. Stocks pile up with that ideology.
22:15 Good grief, no, no, above all, that must never come back. We nearly let communism win, I mean, if we hadn't quickly had the Marshall Plan, I mean, the Cold War, the Wall, the confrontation, there. So, it's a crucial point. As early as 1973, in a book titled Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, he denounces the collusion between the advocates of unfettered pleasure and the advocates of liberal economics. He traces this new political and social order back to the Marshall Plan.
22:50 The Marshall Plan is no longer today just a project, it's the plan. In 1947, the President of the United States, Truman, signed a program aimed at rebuilding the European economy. This aid plan of several billion dollars was made up four-fifths of grants, but the counterparts were immense. They would require, among other things, the French state, through the Blum-Byrnes agreements, to open its market to American film productions. It can be said that in postwar devastated Europe, the situation was, to say the least, troubled; peace had returned, but social peace risked being threatened.
23:24 And the Americans' objective was both to try to improve the economic situation in Europe to prevent social demands from rising. So obviously, all of this wasn't disinterested. On one hand, they had to maintain and increase American influence in Europe — officially they were the liberators — but culturally, this meant getting American-made ideology to penetrate en masse through new modes of consumption, through music and, essentially, also through cinema, which would play a major role in steeping people's minds in the American way of life.
24:01 So the liberal-libertarian is someone who is liberal in economics, that is, in the engine, if you will, of the vehicle, who is liberal of course—I'm going to say a tautology in the liberal sense of the term—but in the sense of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, of free trade, that anything goes. These are metaphors you must already know, but for our audience, let me remind everyone that for a Marxist it's freedom, yes, but the freedom of the fox in the henhouse, or the wolf in the sheepfold, whichever you prefer—you did a very fine program on the law of the strongest.
24:39 And suddenly capitalism is saved, for Clouscard—I'm developing his analysis—it is saved by Cohn-Bendit, symbolically; it's a metonymy when I say Cohn-Bendit, of course, I mean by the figure of the liberal-libertarian, forbidden to forbid, you see, societal issues take precedence over social issues. I remember, I used to go on demonstrations myself, I was young, I was motivated, you see, and I remember that the leftists in the demonstrations used to say, yeah, the CGT's demands are just metro, work, sleep—what contempt!
25:17 That means the societal, yes, but against the social! There, I'm being polemical, but I'd be dishonest not to address these distinctions in order to answer your question. Yes, it's necessary to address them, and so precisely, what you're saying is that we reach a historical point where capitalism needs to mutate in order to survive itself. As you explained very well, capitalism was once founded on a morality of effort, work, and sacrifice, which led it to produce enormously since the disciplined, productive worker necessarily creates a surplus, and so capitalism needs to find an outlet in order to subsist, in order to perpetuate itself, and so, following production, consumption has to be developed, and this is where libertarian ideology comes in to supply the complement capitalism needed—that is, how to justify consumption. It will be justified in the name of emancipation, in the name of transgression, even in the name of freedom.
Permissive in the societal, repressive in the social 26:28 by giving this concept of freedom, in the end, a meaning contrary to its original meaning. If we speak of the freedom of the ancients, the freedom of the Greeks, whether in Plato, the Stoics, or even the Epicureans, freedom was in one way or another associated with mastery, self-mastery, moderation, sobriety, restraint. And here, with the new capitalism, this capitalism of seduction, freedom becomes emancipation from all norms and becomes the free satisfaction of one's desires. And so capitalism needed to create the ideology that would justify this surrender of the individual to his passions, and that's where libertarian thought came to the rescue, in support of this liberalism, notably through the events of May '68.
27:25 So, before talking about May '68, I'd like to ask you a question about the representation we still have today of capitalism as a system that would be intrinsically authoritarian, intrinsically repressive, reactionary. Michel Clouscard's great contribution was to show that this was the case but is no longer, in other words that conservatism, let's say, and prohibition are not consubstantial with capitalism but rather correspond to a certain stage of its development, and that it's in permissiveness that capitalism finds a way to survive itself.
28:09 As I like to say, somewhat ironically, from subversion to subvention there's only one step. That said, that said—and this is where I really want to hear your answer—does this mean, even though I suspect a bit what the answer will be, that transgression itself has become consubstantial with capitalism? What I mean by that is: is it still possible to be transgressive without playing into capitalism's hands? Another way of putting it: how can one be authentically transgressive today?
28:43 I admire your pedagogical skill, because you don't let yourself be carried off by the extensions of my digressions, and each time you make us climb one more floor in understanding what Clouscard calls the liberal-libertarian, the regime we live under. Because here we have a new determination that adds to what I've said so far. Yes, it's through consumption that capitalism will save itself—the opposite of puritanism, then.
29:13 Except that, to answer your question, I'll start with a preliminary point: we need to bring in a new dichotomy, a new distinction, between the social and the societal. Because the new consumption is going to invest itself above all in the societal. And here we find Clouscard's three L's: the playful (ludique), the libidinal, the marginal. The new markets: woman, youth. It's not a moral judgment; he's not saying women should stay in the kitchen.
29:47 But still, when you see the number of publications, of magazines, of specialty press on fashion—and children too, children as well—you see everything there can be, what are called the new markets. So capitalism is permissive at the societal level and repressive, remains repressive, at the social level. That's why this dichotomy is crucial. All this to hide, on the contrary, that asking a young couple today, between 20 and 30, to find housing in Paris—
30:23 I'm not talking about the superfluous, I'm talking about the basic necessity, a roof. You need proof of income—it's a good analysis that Clouscard makes. It's permissive at the level of mores, and again, I insist, because there's a risk of misunderstanding. I have nothing against it. When I insist on the social versus the societal, I'm not being the guillotine of virtue.
30:55 There's as much pleasure and happiness as you want, insofar as it doesn't—well, that's in the Constitution. Freedom consists in doing everything that does not harm others. Michel Clouscard would take up a quarrel against the master thinkers of '68—Althusser, Sartre, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss—intellectuals who, for Michel Clouscard, all have in common that they relegate economic and historical determinations to the background. Let me take Althusser, for example. Let me take the way Althusser brings economic determinations into play. That's not nothing, after all.
31:25 when one claims to follow Marx, he never brings it in concretely. And at the same time, let me explain. He says, of course, it's the essential determination, it's the one that... I'm a Marxist, more Marxist than me you can't get. And the economy is always there as a determination. But—it's his expression, not one he coined himself—he uses 'in the last instance' in such a way, Althusser does, that in the end we end up with a Marxist theory that never talks about economics. As soon as you talk about a particular, concrete case, about aesthetics, there's no more talk of economics.
31:55 It's always 'in the last instance.' Economics only comes up when you're talking about economics. He never says, look, here's the economic determination that explains the shift from serial to post-serial music. I never find it. I'm sharpening the point a bit on purpose. I'd like to come back to something you touched on so we can develop it a little—that is, the opposition between the repression exerted on the worker, on the producer, and the transgression demanded of the consumer, because I find in this duality something that reminds me of the distinction Marx made between real freedom and formal freedom.
Formal freedom, civil society and the state apparatus 32:37 Yes, of course. I think it's very well synthesized in that formula: everything is permitted but nothing is possible. To explain a bit to our listeners: the French Revolution gave birth to the rights of man, and thus to what Marx calls formal freedom, since for him the rights of man are the abstract rights of abstract man—that is, concretely, the rights of bourgeois man, that is, of the one who has the material means to realize that freedom.
33:10 A distinction is made between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen. Who is this man distinct from the citizen? None other than the member of bourgeois society. The rights of man distinct from the rights of the citizen are nothing other than the rights of the member of bourgeois society, that is, of egoistic man. And I would add that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, among the fundamental rights—that is, among the rights considered natural and inherent to the human being, sacred and imprescriptible rights, which is no small thing, inalienable—we find liberty, security, and property.
34:00 Absolutely. So property is considered by the revolutionary bourgeoisie of the 18th century to be an inalienable right. Except that property, before being a right—or rather, in order to be a right—you still need to have the means to it. Because it's not the right to property that makes us a property owner. I'll insist on this point. It's our material means, our resources, that allow us to gain access to property. Hence the phrase: everything is permitted but nothing is possible.
34:32 Everyone has the right to become a property owner, but not everyone has the means to do so. Everything is permitted, but it comes down to money. Yes, that's it exactly. And so I'd venture this somewhat provocative question, Dominique: isn't this freedom we're talking about, that is, what Marx called formal freedom, abstract freedom—isn't this freedom a bourgeois problem? It defines—this is bourgeois liberalism—it even defines, in terms of political philosophy, what Hegel analyzes when he speaks of the 'bürgerliche Gesellschaft,' civil society. And in German, as you know, if you translate it literally, it's 'bourgeois society,' except that for the Germans it's not quite the same as for us—it doesn't have a pejorative connotation. A 'Berliner Bürger' means a citizen who lives in that town [bourg] which is Berlin, there you go.
35:21 But still, indeed, it's no accident that it's in a somewhat forgotten work, hard to find except on the Internet—an early work of Hegel's, the first philosophy of spirit of 1800—I mustn't confuse it, there are two, from 1803, that's the one, and not the one from 1805, the very fertile Jena period, which will end with the Phenomenology of Spirit, the first work of his maturity—where I devoted a video to these passages, where I say, if I didn't tell you it was Hegel, you'd think it was Marx.
35:59 There's an analysis, a pin factory, of the misery caused by assembly-line work and simplification—it's unbelievable, you see. And in it, he gives an expression that Clouscard would turn into one of his titles—I'm not digressing. When I read that passage, he said to me, tell me where that's from, I'm going to use it as a title: The Wild Beast. The wild beast, where Hegel says that in the modern world, this complexity where everyone is linked to everyone else through production and consumption means that things stir from one end of society to the other, and that if it isn't tamed with severity, it stirs like a wild beast.
36:44 And there he defines what he calls the society of the understanding, which is civil society when there is no State. Now here I am very anti-libertarian, all right? But be careful, a distinction that we, Clouscard and I, always systematically pointed out regarding the libertarians—if in '68 there were any around us—was: let's not confuse the State and the State apparatus. We currently live under a State apparatus such as has never existed.
37:17 Surveillance, satellites, cameras—it's... even the Third Reich is a trifle by comparison, in terms of the surveillance of a society, etc. I'm not being violent about it. Fine. But in the service of what is this monstrous State apparatus, developed as never before, materially, in the service of this anti-State and this absence of the State which is the private sphere? There's a distortion we used to rise up against.
37:47 So there, that's my answer to your earlier question—you see, transgression now consists in recalling this, in rehabilitating the State. Look at how the Gilets Jaunes started. People are fed up with having to drive 60 kilometers to collect what Social Security owes them, when they used to have that nearby. And they had a local public school for their kid, and now it's closed. They're complaining about a lack of State. But the State in the Rousseauian sense of general will, not the State apparatus.
38:17 In his later years, Clouscard proposed doubling Parliament—the Chamber of Deputies—with a second chamber, abolishing the Senate and replacing it with the Parliament of the Collective Worker. That is, a parliament that would bring together everything generally called the living forces of the nation, to simplify. The producers of wealth are, after all, best placed to decide the daily fate of a community. It sounds so simple that it's all the more astounding that the proposal isn't more often revived. For him it's a way of ensuring that legislation escapes the danger of formal law—which has been sufficiently denounced, I won't dwell on it—as well as the usual deviations of corruption, lobbying, and so on.
39:06 But it's a much more rational way of giving institutional guarantees so that this world of praxis is no longer simply evacuated from the scene but, on the contrary, occupies a decisive and determining place within the institution itself. When you read Michel Clouscard, there's a historical event which, at the time he's writing, is still very recent—May '68—and which he analyzes as a piece of political philosophy.
Libertarian or anarchist: what the individual owes to the collective 39:37 Absolutely. The question I want to ask you is very simple: in what way is this event of May '68, and more precisely the decoding of this event, fundamental if we want to understand Michel Clouscard's thought and, by extension, contemporary society? Is any question more relevant than May '68? We have to go back to May '68 to begin to see the genesis of the world we still live in, which perhaps currently shows signs of moving into another stage, but well, we're only at the signs stage.
40:11 What has reigned since '68 is precisely this juxtaposition of a capitalism more than ever producing surplus value, and at the same time—and here he didn't go back on it, he cut his losses—at the same time, very liberal at the societal level, very libertarian, sorry, at the societal level. There. I do say libertarian, without going as far as libertarian in the American sense, as you know there's yet another thing, the one who waits for the tax man at the entrance of his ranch with a shotgun.
40:47 You're right to bring that up, because I deliberately skipped a question, telling myself it wasn't necessarily necessary, and in the end I want to ask it. It would almost be a critical question toward Michel Clouscard that I'm putting to you today, and it concerns the choice of the word 'libertarian.' And I wondered whether this word might not be the vehicle, possibly, of a misunderstanding or confusion, in the sense that, in the tradition of European ideas, and notably in France, the word 'libertarian' is associated with the anarchist current, with what's called libertarian socialism.
41:28 Now, in its contemporary usage, that is, the one Clouscard uses, I get the impression that what he calls libertarian would be, let's say, the apology for hedonism—and moreover for this contemporary hedonism which has little to do with Epicurean hedonism, for example. In the meantime, we had the utilitarians who had already distorted hedonism, so in the end we understand fairly well what hedonism can designate nowadays. But isn't the choice of the word 'libertarian' liable to cause confusion and, consequently, the rejection by that whole fringe of anarchists who defend individual freedom body and soul, without reducing freedom to hedonism—if you prefer, without reducing freedom to unrestrained enjoyment—who risk either feeling judged and accused by Clouscard and thus being deaf to his discourse, or, on the contrary, considering that Clouscard didn't understand what libertarianism was and therefore that his thought isn't relevant?
42:38 Absolutely. You seem to ask questions with a clarity that helps avoid misunderstandings. Let me answer on several levels. First, I think I gave a long explanation earlier to say that Clouscard was not opposed to pleasure, still less to happiness. So he's not anti-hedonist either. What he really reproaches anarchism for is an inconsistency of non-recognition—a Hegelian term—of what the individual owes to the collective, but not in terms of debt in the German sense.
43:12 You know that in German—you must know this—debt and sin are the same word, Schuld. I say this for our audience because it explains a lot about the standoff between Mrs. Merkel and the Greeks. It's an extraordinary language. Yes, if you have a debt, it means you're a sinner. Financial orthodoxy. So, and above all, I'm answering you—we used to discuss this with Clouscard, so I'm speaking as if citing him as a reference.
43:48 There's an extraordinary passage. There are actually two that bring this together. One in Emile and one in the most individualistic work there is, because it's extraordinary that the same man wrote The Social Contract and, at the same time, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, where he depicts a kind of ecstasy that's almost been compared to Zen, to oriental ecstasy, a kind of absolute. 'As long as this state lasts, one is sufficient unto oneself like God.' That means that if it lasted, one would actually be God.
44:18 You see, that goes far. What does one enjoy in a situation where there is nothing outside oneself? Listen, it's hard to believe this is the same man who wrote The Social Contract. What richness this body of work has. Now, the contradiction is resolved in the texts I'm about to cite. I like to find things in the... not to interpret—generally, interpretation always has a slightly pejorative ring to it. For me, it smacks a bit of cooking, if you will, and I prefer analysis. It's an intratextual matter.
44:49 Now, when Emile's mother—who, as you know, is an aristocrat, unless it's a deliberate staging, I don't know, in a milieu where there are no more prejudices to overcome—so when he tries to persuade the mother of his pupil that Emile must now, at the stage he's reached, learn a manual trade, it's a scandal. Right? Already, work in general, even that of the banker or the bourgeois, is unthinkable for an aristocrat—let alone a manual trade.
45:20 So, I quote: 'My son an artisan, sir, do you really mean it?' The teacher's reply, if I may call him that: 'I mean it better than you, madam, who never wanted to make him anything but a marquis, a lord, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing. I am going to raise him to the rank of man. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals in that capacity than in all those he would owe to you.' That means that being born a man is not enough to be a man, even for Rousseau. It's a magnificent passage. And above all, let's go to the root with someone like Proudhon.
45:53 You see, I'm really staying within the tradition, I take it into account. Proudhon, for instance—this is no doubt his most famous, most popular quotation—property is theft. Without distinguishing, as would come a bit later, between the property of my toothbrush, of my wife—that's just a way of speaking—and the property of the means of production and exchange that decide the fate of a community. So, it's quite different after all. But never mind. For now, I'm not concerned with these distinctions.
46:23 Property is theft. I find Rousseau's formula, which I'll quote now from Emile, more pertinent. He says, every idle citizen is a rogue. And there he settles the question—well, he answers, in my view, with the utmost clarity, the question you're asking—when he says, outside society... I like to give the exact text, but well, since some in our audience—I'm Corsican speaking to you, Isola means an island—the isolated man has the right to live as he pleases.
47:02 Where I come from, we'd say 'take to the maquis,' if that suits him. But in the society in which he lives—pay attention, this is the most important word, and it's pre-Marxian—necessarily at others' expense, he owes them, in labor, the price of his upkeep. This holds without exception, rich or poor, powerful or weak: every idle citizen is a rogue. But Rousseau is the first—let me reassure those who think he doesn't sound like fun, that he was a pleasure-seeker, you only need to read the Confessions, it's a constant quest for pleasure and happiness—but not through injustice.
47:41 But there, that answers it: the libertarian sometimes forgets, even in his own theories—and the extremist, but that's not Proudhon's point of view, let's be fair—it's the libertarian in the American sense, whom I mentioned earlier, a bit of a caricature, who in the United States waits for the tax man with his rifle at the entrance of his ranch, saying I owe nothing to anyone. But in that case, says Rousseau, you're also not consuming the social—you have electricity, you have this and that, you have your supplies, there you go.
48:11 So, Rousseau against Rousseau, since we're talking about him and you've reminded us he's a major source of influence on Clouscard—Rousseau also had a relationship to desire that he sets out in La Nouvelle Héloïse, if I remember correctly, when he says: 'Woe to him who has nothing left to desire, he loses so to speak everything he possesses; we enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy.' And he ends that passage with a phrase I find admirable: 'Such is the nothingness of human things: apart from the Being that exists by itself, there is nothing beautiful but what is not.'
48:50 And so, what I understand by that, behind of course the poetry of this text and its depth, is that what also constitutes the enjoyment of desire is not only its fulfillment, but simply the imaginative charge it carries, that it sets in motion, and so there's also this side of Rousseau that respects desire as desire, and not as a pretext for fulfillment. And that, as strange as it may seem, brings us back to May '68, which we were talking about just before, since that's the 'enjoy without restraint,' so desire only makes sense if it's fulfilled—and we come back to the distinction you make in the documentary about May '68, that is, the social May '68 and the societal May '68, the worker's May '68 and the student's May '68.
Working-class May 68 versus student May 68 49:48 Yes, schematically, that's it. There's a tendency, moreover, either to conflate them or to forget that there was a working-class May '68 even though it was the biggest strike in the history of France. And what you're explaining, and what Clouscard explains, is that contrary to what people think, not only is the student May '68 not a complement to the working-class May '68, it's its antithesis. And it's true that in our collective imagination, even for those who weren't born at that time, May '68 remains associated with a revolution in morals.
50:24 It remains associated with sexual liberation. It is forbidden to forbid. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who moreover called himself a liberal-libertarian. And I recall that Cohn-Bendit's first demand was associated with the girls' dormitory. A year before the events of '68 actually broke out, it was — I noted the date — March 21, 1967, the occupation of a building at the Nanterre university residence for, I quote, the free movement, a liberal argument, of boys in the girls' dormitories.
51:02 So, could you tell us more precisely what Michel Clouscard's view of May '68 was? What analysis did he make of it? We've talked about Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Clouscard cites him as the archetypal figure of this movement. What is Clouscard's analysis of May '68? Well, we can never insist enough on the details that pile up in answering your ever more precise question.
51:32 He would say to — well, Clouscard says it's a metonymy, as I said earlier — to the student who says, well, I still have the right to go to the girls' dormitory, it's not just nonsense, I imagine. Clouscard would say: do whatever you want, but don't say that this is when you're making the revolution we were waiting for, the one that was supposed to free us from oppression or free the working class on which the whole rest of the edifice of exploitation rests.
52:05 That's all... I was thinking of the formula he repeated obsessively: do what you want, I'm not a moralist, but state it as such. Don't feed us nonsense that the real revolution is you. Because what was being said to the left of the Communist Party in '68 — I'll pause my sentence, I learned that from you, you have an art of suspending your sentence in philosophy, no but pedagogically it's brilliant — what was being said to the left of the Communist Party in '68 was to the right of de Gaulle.
52:35 That's a serious thing to say. De Gaulle was a man of the right, he never played it, unlike Mitterrand, the way I would, a man of the left with his hand on his heart — no. De Gaulle was a man of the right. But he kicked out NATO, right? And as long as he was there, there was no England, and therefore no New Zealand or Australian sheep, in the Common Market. Well, that's another matter. I voted against him when he was in power, so I can allow myself to say what the Communist Party at the time called the positive aspects of the general's foreign policy.
53:07 Well, those who were to the left of the Communist Party — I'm going to shock you — that's the revenge of Vichy. That's where Mitterrand comes from. And again, I swear I have no malice, I'm not making a value judgment, one can be pro-Vichy, I'm not... We're doing philosophy here, we're trying to see clearly. Now, everyone — well, not everyone, but you, you probably know it — the photo where he's introduced to Pétain, do you know that photo where Mitterrand is introduced by a third party?
53:40 There's the man we need, who militated outside against the 'foreigners' before the war, you know, with the Camelots du roi, but who, a generation later, would create Harlem Désir. He's good, though — de Gaulle is a great statesman, this one is a great politician. At the time, moreover, of the liberal turn — exactly, in 1983. And at that moment, the eclipsing of the social by the societal, once again. This is a small detour I'm making, but it's not really a detour. We're right at the center of your question.
54:11 When he becomes — he's designated as the new general secretary of the new Socialist Party, we agree, in '71 — even though he doesn't even hold a party card. Can you imagine? I don't know, in China, in the CCP, a guy who's general secretary who's never been a party member? It's really extraordinary. And then he says this sentence, and in my opinion it's one of the rare times he wasn't lying: we can take 3 million votes from the French Communist Party, let no one say he came to beat the right.
54:48 Yes. Well, maybe he did the right thing there, maybe communism was a danger, I'm not settling that question. Again, I'm trying to be intellectually honest, nobody is free of ideology — I have my unconscious too — but I'm trying to be intellectually honest, to be consistent. So, to answer your question more directly now, I mentioned earlier that societal demands going into the girls' dormitory were not merely an extension, a complement, as you said, of social demands, but rather, according to Clouscard and according to me, served at the time — not in themselves — as an obstruction, a displacement, a subterfuge. That's the quote I mentioned earlier: that the leftists, in the sense of the time — that is, I'm trying to be precise, the union, in the mathematical sense, of — I'll put them in chronological order so as not to upset anyone — the anarchists, the oldest ones, etc., I'll make a nuance for the anarchists later, the anarchists, the Trotskyists, and the Maoists, the whole set of those who despised the Communist Party and the CGT,
55:58 roughly speaking, why not, that's not the point, I'm not defending sectarian camps — except that these people called social demands "categorical" demands, métro-boulot-dodo — again, I find there's contempt there, so it really is an obstruction: let's go to the girls' dormitory rather than fight so that retirement isn't pushed back indefinitely, since that's more topical now, you see, we haven't made much progress on that front. So I insist a lot on this, and I come back — I promised you I'd make a small nuance regarding anarchism, because you dug into the concept of freedom earlier — I will always have respect for the anarchist, fellow fighter of the working class, those of the Commune, the Louise Michels — I'm not going to compare that, obviously, to Cohn-Bendit, who called himself libertarian in '68, I quote him there, and liberal in '78.
Pompidou and the class determination of May 68 57:04 And in the documentary — so I'll remind everyone, the documentary Everything is Permitted, Nothing is Possible, freely available on YouTube, which I invite our listeners to go watch — one of the speakers, whose name I've forgotten, talks about a dinner with Georges Pompidou. Georges Pompidou, as a reminder for younger viewers, was Prime Minister at the time of May '68, a former investment banker, and he later became president until his death, in '74 I believe. And so this speaker talks about a conversation he had, as he himself puts it, off the record, with Pompidou. Pompidou said that de Gaulle, who was very old-school France, very conservative, wanted to have the protesters — the May '68 students — removed by the army, and that it was Pompidou who intervened to say no, because these protesters, these dissenters, currently students, are the future elite of the nation, and you don't shoot the future elite of the nation.
58:14 And when I heard this anecdote, it made me ask this question: isn't there a kind of liberal unconscious at work, such that when a businessman, a former investment banker turned Prime Minister before becoming president — that reminds us of someone else — takes up, indirectly, the defense of the May '68 protesters, isn't there, deep down, something in him that understands that these protesters aren't really protesters, aren't revolutionaries, but are in fact the future of capitalism?
58:48 One couldn't be more Clouscardian than what you just said. That's exactly the analysis Clouscard makes, of course, and even regarding the repression — you're going to say, you don't shoot at... Clouscard used to say: they club the sons of the bourgeoisie, they shoot the sons of workers, the workers themselves, because the only death there was in '68, apart from the poor kid who drowned while being chased by the police in a bend of the Seine, at Flins I believe — the only death by gunfire was a worker in Sochaux, at the Peugeot factory in Sochaux, yes.
59:24 So you are literally within Clouscard's dichotomy: they club the sons of the bourgeoisie, but they're not going to bring in the army, as you said, as de Gaulle wanted — and of course, we're reminding ourselves that there's a class determination at work in May '68, quite simply. Clouscard's hypothesis was that the societal, liberal aspect of '68 was designed to serve as a counter-revolutionary barrier against a process that was becoming fatal for capitalism.
59:56 May '68 is a play, a play performed by three, each playing his role: de Gaulle, the authoritarian father, Pompidou, the debonair, liberal uncle, Cohn-Bendit, the enfant terrible. Michel Clouscard sees in May '68 a palace revolution, a second Marshall Plan of a symbolic order that would see the alliance of the liberal and the libertarian bring about the exit from the stage of the representatives of the old bourgeoisie. The middle classes finally get to join the banquet of power.
Everything is permitted, nothing is possible: desire and constraint 1:00:30 We've talked a lot about Michel Clouscard's emblematic phrase, "Everything is permitted, nothing is possible." And it's worth knowing that this phrase became the title of a song by Bernard Lavilliers, even the title of one of his albums, released in 1984. I listened closely to this song to prepare for our interview, Dominique, and Bernard Lavilliers does something I found very interesting. He's a poet, so he plays with words. And in his song, he takes up this phrase but also proposes two alternative versions, two modified versions, which I'd like to put to you to find out whether they're just poetic musings, sufficient unto themselves aesthetically, or whether, philosophically, they can be integrated into what we've discussed today about Michel Clouscard's thought.
1:01:22 He tells us, Bernard Lavilliers: since everything is permitted, nothing is possible — implying that the possible is the realm of the unpredictable, so if everything is permitted, there's no longer room for the unpredictable, since there's no longer room for real transgression if everything is permitted after all. Second formulation: nothing is permitted, everything is possible. So there he performs what's called a chiasmus, an inversion that would show that, paradoxically, there are more possibilities in a totalitarian, prohibitive regime than in a liberal-libertarian regime that would be ultra-permissive, precisely because possibility always emerges from a background of prohibition.
1:02:06 And the example that came to mind at that point is Leonardo da Vinci, the great Italian genius of the Renaissance, who is said to have repressed his homosexuality, his immanent desire, in order to sublimate it through artistic creation. And so it's precisely because nothing was permitted for him that everything became possible. So I'd like to put these two variants of Clouscard's phrase to you. I didn't know them. Well, there you go, at least now you're discovering them. Since everything is permitted, nothing is possible, and: nothing is permitted, so everything is possible.
1:02:41 The example of Leonardo da Vinci is telling because the concept of sublimation you just mentioned itself somewhat sums up the answer that needs to be given to what raises a question in the formula — namely that nature, to go back to the state of nature I mentioned earlier, the animal part we carry until the end of our lives, even though we remain within zoology until the end of our lives, even as anthropology comes to be grafted on top with other principles, often negative ones.
1:03:18 I won't go back over that, we saw it earlier. I like your paradox, which is a limit-case of the assumption you're proposing, almost provocative, but provocative in a way that spurs reflection — that in the extreme case it's totalitarian regimes that are somehow most favorable to the richness of desire. Without wanting to defend Sartre's point of view here, toward which Clouscard was very critical, I find the Sartrean idea extremely bold, extremely provocative, that we were never as free as during the Occupation — beyond the emotional reaction one might have on hearing that phrase, it still leads to reflection on the very essence of freedom as transgression, and therefore as needing a barrier in order to assert itself and become concrete.
1:04:15 Quite so. Since you mention Sartre, let me tell you right away that I'd give a quarter of Sartre now compared to what we're often served as dominant ideology today — that's not bad. No, but at the time it was a bit, you see, it was the essence of fashionable society. It's not Sartre's thought or statements, it's the cigarette in the mouth, that sort of thing, you see, the imagery, that's something else. But let me get back to the substance — I'll take the example of Saint-Exupéry, not a reference I often use, not Marxist, not even Gaullist for that matter — in the middle of the war, in Flight to Arras he has unforgettable pages on the fact that even though it's wartime, never have we enjoyed life so much — that echoes a bit what Sartre says, doesn't it?
1:05:03 Between two dashes to the plane, because you suddenly have a mission where you have a fifty-fifty chance of losing your life — what richness in the life one leads. I refer you to Flight to Arras, it's extraordinary. And there's even the antithesis, which is in Night Flight, when he has engine trouble in the desert — his plane, I lived that experience in Niger, you know, right in the middle of the Sahara — and there he suddenly experiences real thirst, which we never know here, because here we're thirsty but we know that somewhere there's a Coke with the bottle, with condensation on it, waiting for us — you see the imagery I'm already attaching to it.
1:05:43 There's, well, one waits patiently, but you know you'll be able to quench your thirst and get home. Except that here, that's not the case. And he says: for the first time, I felt the need to drink. Until then, I had only had the desire. It's magnificent. He wakes up in the arms of a Tuareg he found unconscious and brought back to life. And he says: the need for thirst is an atrocious pain, whereas the desire to drink can be given whatever coloring you like.
1:06:16 So yes, of course. Well, we're circling around a theme here, which is Kant's dove, if you look closely. The dove that is under the illusion that, if it weren't for the air resisting it, it would fly faster, when in fact it would fall like a stone. It's the resistance that allows it to fly. And that brings two things to mind. Michel Houellebecq's remark explaining that the constraints of poetic writing help him and foster expressiveness rather than limiting it. And another thought that comes to mind is Michel Clouscard's relationship to sport, and the fact that sport, as the site of overcoming constraint par excellence and as the sublimation of physical achievement — you said in an interview, I believe, that Michel Clouscard managed to get you to revise your opinion about sport and athletic achievement, in which the worker sees a kind of sublimation of his own effort at work, but this time under applause, since the athlete, through his performance, arouses admiration.
1:07:24 And recognition. Well, you flatter me greatly by bringing up this theme, because it may be an aspect — not a marginal aspect at all in Clouscard — he was a finalist in the 200-meter flat race, I mean, in his youth. But I remember the interview you're referring to, where I said — I was a young bourgeois, I had my reference points, I said, but still, the Tour de France, it's kind of vulgar, isn't it, the peasants there, the crowds on the side, the caps, the ads, the following cars throwing out little gifts—
1:07:54 The caravans there. That's really — it was he who made me realize what you just said. He says that the Tour de France has been measured as the greatest muscular effort a human being can produce, more than the marathon. If you're not trained, you keel over even before you've done a tenth of the climb. And it's precisely the recognition of physical effort, of the muscular effort that the manual worker spends his whole life doing, but which here, as you put it very well, receives popular recognition, unanimous recognition.
1:08:29 And at best, nowadays — now they all have a coach, the great athletes. I don't mean any disrespect, but a coach onto whom they can offload their narcissism: well, I maybe didn't — I didn't achieve a counter-feat, but that's because I wasn't in shape, but otherwise I'm still the best — I'm exaggerating a bit. Back then, the guy would climb through the Tour de France and say, I'll try to do better next time. He remained popular. We're slowly drawing toward the end of this interview, Dominique. I have two more questions for you. Do you think that Michel Clouscard's critique of capitalism, of liberal-libertarianism, has been taken into account?
Reception of Clouscard and reasons to read him today 1:09:08 Has it been heard, in the sense that, as you yourself say, we only hear what we expect to hear? Has Clouscard's critique been heard and absorbed by the political parties claiming to defend the working classes? Well, Clouscard was never heard at the level of the executive bodies of organizations. Forgive my somewhat laborious answer — I could have said by the political parties, but even at the grassroots, I remember: 'Ah, you knew Clouscard, well, it's a shame, nobody talks about him anymore, but it was something, the capitalism of seduction.'
1:09:51 At the grassroots, I gave a talk recently — I was invited by the section, the 'poor old folks,' sorry, it's a bit sleepy there, in Castelsarrasin near Montauban, to give a talk on the problems currently happening in Africa. We all know the countries sending Macron packing — get out — Mali, etc., countries I know well. And there, I found that he was popular at the grassroots level. That's why I said he was never recognized by the executive bodies of organizations.
1:10:28 I can't help it — alas! I mean, I said that this is precisely what made up, unfortunately, the essence of his ontological solitude, from which he suffered greatly. Last question, Dominique. In your view, why should we read Clouscard today? The question and the answer... Had you asked me that question just, I don't know, three or four years ago, I would have answered more easily.
1:10:58 But now, because of the shifts I alluded to earlier, in how the world is beginning to undergo a certain mutation — this world of which Clouscard is, in my opinion, the most thorough reader — this world of liberalism, of libertarianism, broadly speaking, where the elites... Actually, I hate that word. For me, the elite is Mozart buried in a common grave because there was no money. Now people say the elite means the rich. It's strange, isn't it. The elite is Marie Curie using her savings to fund her experiments because there wasn't yet a CNRS budget.
1:11:36 So, now, I would say that it's perhaps now that Clouscard should be read most pertinently, most with a critical distance, if I may put it that way, precisely because we're gaining some perspective on the world he denounced, that he decoded. And, I'm not doing this on purpose, but you're giving me the chance to end with a famous quote from Hegel: it is only at the falling of the dusk that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings.
1:12:09 Minerva, Athena, was an emblem of philosophy, or rather of wisdom. And the owl of Minerva is the bird that flies at dusk, when it's already almost too late. So, hurry up and read him.
